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A Possible Workaround For The S3TC Patent Situation

07-19-2011, 02:00 AM

Phoronix: A Possible Workaround For The S3TC Patent Situation

While S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) is widely used by many games and applications since its inclusion into OpenGL 1.3 and Microsoft DirectX 6.0, these lossy texture compression algorithms have not been implemented in the open-source Linux graphics drivers. This lack of open-source support is due to S3 Graphics holding the patent rights to this technology that they actively license to major hardware vendors. There long has been an external library that can be loaded and will work with most Mesa / Gallium3D drivers for advertising S3TC support, but it's not found by default and it's not included in leading Linux distributions due to these legal fears. There may now be a new solution for the S3TC Linux problem thanks to the advent of a new (and simpler) texture compression algorithm that can serve as a drop-in replacement.

Comment

Since S3TC omits key elements of the S3TC texture compression method (e.g. quantization is not done in the block encoder but within the pre-processor, no derived colors, etc), they believe -- and based upon the input of others -- that this new method is not stepping on the S3TC patent.